Senior Member

joined:Dec 26, 2003
posts:1284
votes: 0

50,000 to register a new TLD, if i read it correctly. It means i could start a TLD of "sucks" and have www.<company>.sucks or www.<politician>.sucks and for every TLD registered it could have infinite domains under it.

Senior Member from US

joined:Apr 27, 2001
posts: 12171
votes: 60

Oh, that is a "major disaster" just waiting to happen. Now, who was the mastermind behind that plot?

What they should be doing is cleaning up the existing TLD space. They could probably free up quite a bit by doing a mass review of the current TLD space and just locking it down properly. But no, they will continue to do crap like this and expand the Internet until it bursts and then what are they going to do? A bit far fetched but you get my point.

We don't need any more freakin' domain extensions! Work the ones you have. If this doesn't get voted right out the door, I'll have lost respect for the whole domain system. :(

Moderator This Forum

For those who are inclinded to profit from confusion this is a "phishing expedition" in the making. Can you imagine the level of uncertainty generated by adding unlimited new gTLDs?

Jane Doe, Web User: "Was that .cc, .ccd, .crcd, .crdcrd, .credcard, .creditcard or .goofy where I signed up for . . ?"

More gTLDs means more income flowing to ICANN and the growing need for gTLD regulation leading to the creation of more jobs . . for family and friends? I wonder how strong their anti-nepotism rules are? I wonder how anyone gets a job application for working for ICANN? I'd love the travel benefits, since there's a lot of travel involved with such a global enterprise. More gTLDs likely means a growing travel budget.

"Yo! ICANN! People are barely using .Biz and not too many are using .Info or .Net, so where are you really going with this?"

Byzantine. Bizarre. .Biz as usual?

Sorry. A bit of a rant. This just strikes me as nuts, nutz, nutts, nutsus, nudz, nutds, nsts,

Senior Member from US

Too funny. There are quite a few of those cybersquatters that will drop $50k easily!

But wait, there's more...

ICANN is expected to give priority to companies or organizations with trademarked names.

Ah, there are some restrictions. But still...

Paul Twomey, the CEO of ICANN, told the BBC that allowing the new naming conventions would create new "real estate" on the Internet. "It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the Internet," he said.

Just how big has the Internet grown? And, what percentage of the Internet now could be classified as garbage? I know, its all in the eye of the beholder. Well, the beholders need to take a little more control over existing domain spaces and maybe clean those up a bit.

I get confused just thinking about all the possible extensions and what it may open up in regards to further challenges for online business owners. Where's the value proposition? I already have the .com. Why do I need to invest $50k for the .com.trademark? Oh, I see where you're going with this. It provides a layer above the cybersquatters who have the .coms. Now, just how long do you think it is going to take Joe Public to catch on to this? Heck, many can't even remember to type .net or .org let alone .com.trademark or whatever.

Preferred Member

Junior Member

joined:Oct 26, 2001
posts:197
votes: 0

It's so appalling to me that I don't believe it could actually happen.

The thing that I don't get FTA is:

The new addressing scheme should alleviate fears that ICANN will run out of addresses. The organization estimated last year that only 17 percent of the original 4 billion network addresses remained available. And it predicted that it would run out of new addresses within the next five years.

What? That's IPv4 ADDRESSES, not domain names! Is this the justification they are giving for this? Besides market demand? Is this ICANN's response to domain names being subjugated by search engines? Or perhaps it's just terrible reporting by CNET.

If this passes it will be a whole new dynamic- keywords will shift to the top level (as opposed to living in the second level alongside a brand name), and everyone will have to own their brand name in those new keyword based TLDs. Sounds like a great way to stimulate the economy... maybe.

Full Member

joined:June 24, 2002
posts:304
votes: 0

I already have the stutter/repeat problem so I'm going to buy '.comdotcom'.

Seriously though, it could be lucrative for marketers, think of this in terms of without the 'www' (though I do like gcarn's www example). Like a .gifts or a .car/.auto example. Coupled with larger media, an 'audi.car' address or a 'christmas.gifts' might be well for people to make some cash with.

I do agree though that this will still make the .com more valuable, at least for the short term until user behavior catches up.

Full Member

joined:Mar 22, 2008
posts: 317
votes: 0

Making tld's cost $50 grand will not make the internet larger - it will stop a lot of growth, because small underfunded organizations won't make as many websites. This is bad news... I'd sue if this goes through.

Senior Member

Senior Member

joined:June 13, 2003
posts:1281
votes: 0

I'm not sure I see the value... so it'd be "ford.ford", "microsoft.microsoft", and "coke.coke"? That's silly. Why not just let companies register a single word and be done with it? How in the world do they decide who gets things like ".dog", ".computer", ".horse", ".table", ".loan", ".mortgage", etc. Will the bidding start at $50k?

This is absurd.

I think it's more like ICANN'T.

<edit> Wow, I just looked at the ICANN article regarding this. It sounds like it's almost a done deal. In their timeline they show implementation by Q2 of 09. They have invested a lot of money in this so far. They even have a decision matrix in PDF format that shows how the new gTLDs make it to the auction block for bidding. Yikes. The biggest pocket books will win. </edit>

Full Member

joined:Aug 17, 2004
posts:217
votes: 0

I'd like to add to the voices of discontent. Greed is the only possible explanation to such a move that would so clearly deteriorate e-commerce.

Currently it is necessary to register dozens of domains to protect a brand... that isn't too much fun, specially with new ones like .me coming out all the time, but at least it is possible. Afterthis proposition, to protect a major brand, at least domain wise, would literally be impossible... what a headache, and for what? So a few can line their pockets?

I'm trying to think that they wouldn't really do it... but I have thought that about humanity before and I have been disappointed.

Preferred Member

joined:June 11, 2003
posts: 417
votes: 0

Icann should be scrapped. The only thing they are interested in is making more money. Icann should be replaced with an international body where countries need to agree on changes together - hopefully stopping absurd ideas like this.

This will make it a thousand times easier to trick people into visiting dodgy websites, astronomically increases the cost to companies trying to buy domains to protect their existing brand(s), and devalues existing domain names.

New User

joined:July 15, 2005
posts: 23
votes: 0

Hi all,

As it happens a bit too often, the original information has lost quite a bit of the details in the process.

No, it will not be possible to register anything as a new TLD. It will be possible to register anything, provided it meets a number of conditions. Those include: - the ability of the new registry to meet financial and technical conditions (operating a TLD registry is not for the faint-hearted). Those conditions are basically the same that were used when selecting registries for the existing gTLDs. - the new TLD must not be able to be confused with any existing one (adios .con, .corn, .c0m etc.) - the new TLD must not be in conflict with existing trademarks

It shows the process for obtaining a new TLD, and it clearly shows it's not "I order .whatever, pay with my credit card, and my new TLD is available minutes later". It's a matter of weeks if not months, with lots of "evaluations", "objections", "checks" and whatnot.

You might want to pay attention in particular to the following little boxes: - Business Criteria Evaluation - Technical Criteria Evaluation - String confusion - Existing legal rights - Morality and public order - Community objection

In short, the new process only means that instead of ICANN deciding "oh, we're going to add new gTLD .whatever, let's find a suitable registry for it", it'll be "if you want to submit a new gTLD and operate it, you can come ask for it". But the rest of the process doesn't change much (with a lot of checks added to make sure that the TLD itself isn't a problem).

And no, there won't be millions of new TLDs. Probably a few hundred or thousands, but not that much more IMHO. Given the dramatic failure of many of the existing "recent" gTLDs (.info, .biz, etc.) and the continued predominance of .com and to a lesser extent of the ccTLDs, I don't see that changing a lot: many will try to open new extensions and will utterly fail, a few might take off (mostly "community"-oriented ones, like .somelanguage or .someregion, and maybe a few like .movie, .child, .blog...).

Obviously there will be quite some demand for things like .porn, .sex and whatever, but I'm not sure these will pass the "Morality and public order" check.

One other case is that of people currently delivering 3rd level domain names: blog/forum hosting platforms, "free" redirect domain names, and such. These might want to simplifly domains a bit (whatever.blogspot.com might become whatever.blog), but given that they will (AFAIK) have to pay a fee to ICANN for each second-level domain, that's not really a certainty yet...